Spaghetti Squash Soup

Spaghetti squash is an odd sort of vegetable. This sturdy, almost-impossible-to-cut-open yellow squash cooks up to reveal stringy insides that can substitute directly for pasta. It just isn’t at all what you expect when you hold one in your hand.

I bought a spaghetti squash at the grocery store a year or two ago and cooked it up for dinner (as I recall, we had a vegetable pasta sauce thing to go over top of it, and we ate it as though it were actual spaghetti). Everyone liked it, and I saved the seeds and planted them in the garden.

This year, we got quite a few squash from the plants that grew from the saved seeds – and this is not a small thing, given how generally awful our garden season was this summer. The squash are now piled in a cool spot in the house, and I peek in on them every so often to make sure none have gone soft or started to mould. So far, all is well in the squash pile. :)

Today I had a craving for a nice warm soup for supper, and so I took 2 of the larger squash, cut them in half (with a really big knife and some pounding), then set them cut side down in a lasagne pan filled with about an inch of water and baked them until they were soft. (After I started, I read that you can also stab them with a fork, cook them whole, and then slice them after they’ve cooked to a softer state … hadn’t thought of that!)

Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian cookbook has an excellent recipe for pumpkin soup which basically involves sautéing an onion in oil with some ginger, then adding the cooked squash and a chopped potato or two, topping the pot up with vegetable broth and simmering with pepper and a couple of bay leaves until it’s all cooked. Once the potatoes are soft, the soup is run through the blender, then reheated with a bit of milk. The recipe says you can substitute any yellow-fleshed squash for the original pumpkin, and spaghetti squash worked out just fine.

The resulting soup is delicious – very gentle, not overwhelmingly spiced (although there is another variation with curry which I may try on a cold winter day), and nicely comforting with a loaf of home made bread.

I made sure to set the seeds aside to dry out for next year’s garden: any vegetable that keeps this well and cooks up into a meal perfectly suited to chilly winter days is definitely on my to-grow list!

Spreading the joy of ‘good work’

I enjoy the satisfaction of ‘making stuff’. I really like seeing the juice from the apples in the pantry, the fruit leather packed in kids’ lunches, the dried onions on the counter. It’s the feeling of having done good work.

Of course, I talk about this kind of stuff with my coworkers, who quite often look at me as though I’m a wee bit daft for having spent part of my weekend processing apple syrup, but still, they bring me their windfall apples and save assorted leftover bits for the chickens. :)

This week, one of the coworkers-with-the-apple-trees told me he had made applesauce from his apples, just the way I’d described it. It was a fair bit of work, he said, but I reassured him that it gets simpler with a bit of practice, and besides, the apples are free and they might as well be put to good use!

He wanted to know what to do with all the sauce he’d made (I suggested freezing it, in addition to baking with it – he brought in a batch of absolutely fabulous apple cinnamon muffins) and then I showed him some dehydrators online (I’d brought in some fruit leather earlier in the week). His next question was how to extract juice from the cooked apples, as cheesecloth wasn’t working.

I explained that the cheesecloth that you buy at the store is way too porous to use for draining fruits, especially cooked and mushed apples. An ancient tea towel that’s been around since the seventies would be about right, or an old well washed t-shirt. Laid in a colander over a bowl, you don’t even have to rig up the whole ‘sugar bag from a broomstick’ deal (yes, I am actually old enough to remember jelly juice being extracted that way).

Regardless, sure feels good to share the joy of ‘good work’ with someone else. It was cool to see the big grin on his face as he told me about what he’d done on the weekend.

He is darn proud of himself, and rightly so. :)

Things to do with apples

The people I work with have gotten used to the idea that I’m the person who is likely to make use of leftovers of one form or another.

“Will any of your critters eat these stale carrot muffins?”

“We’re going on vacation and had two tomatoes and three peppers left in the fridge … would you like them?”

and now …

“We have a lot of apples off our tree this year, would you be able to make use of them? They’re kinda banged up…”

You betcha!

The chickens love carrot muffins, and we are not at all embarrassed to make good use of surplus food, no matter how it came to be surplus. And apples … oh my, there are so many uses for apples!

Some of the sheep like to eat them, right out of your hand. The small ones (which they can get into their mouths to chew) are great treats.

Really damaged apples make great juice: just cook them with some water until they soften, then hang them in the juice bag over night. The juice, cooked with a lot of sugar and a bit of pectin, makes a marvelous apple syrup, which is delicious mixed with oatmeal and hot water for breakfast (my usual morning fare, eaten once I get to the office).

Apples in any sort of in-between state make good apple sauce, which in turn makes good fruit leather. I just dump the apples into the big cauldron (stock pot), add a bit of water, and cook until they turn to mush, assisting as needed with the potato masher. The resulting pulp is scooped into a colander resting on a large bowl, and squished so that the soft, smooth paste goes through the colander mesh and the larger seeds, skins and chunky bits remain in the colander. The leftovers are fed to the chickens or sheep, and the pulp is poured into jars. I could hot process the jars and keep apple sauce for winter, but at the moment I’m on a fruit leather kick – our kids all love it, and the home made stuff is so much better than the store kind … no preservatives, no packaging, and only as much sugar as is needed to sweeten up the apples. I have trays for the dehydrator that are specifically for making fruit leather, so all I have to do is pour the apple sauce onto the trays and plug it in overnight. Voila – fruit leather!

I’ve also done some apples as dried apple chunks, for winter baking, although that takes more work and is best suited to big apples that are worth the effort of peeling. :)

It really doesn’t require a whole lot of effort, and it’s such a good feeling to have healthy, home made food to put in the pantry. Even if it was just “leftovers” to start with!

Dehydrating the bounty

I do love my little American Harvest dehydrator.

It takes very little time to slice up some veggies or fruit to put on the trays, then it gets plugged in overnight, and in the morning, you have dehydrated food ready to go into jars for storage! Everything shrinks during dehydration, so six or seven trays full of sliced veggies will usually fit into a peanut butter jar once they’ve been dried out. With our small pantry, this is a definite bonus.

The big advantage of the dehydrator is that you can work with small quantities as they come available – you don’t need to clear the kitchen and “do the canning”, you can just chop up whatever’s on hand.

During the summer, the excess spinach from the garden got dried: it makes a wonderful addition to omelettes, crumbled and sprinkled over top while it’s cooking.

Now that the onions have been harvested, the big ones have been braided together and hung up to dry, but the smaller ones, or those bruised or otherwise unlikely to survive very long  have been chopped up and dehydrated (with the machine set outside overnight … that’s an odour you do not want filling your house!).

It’s a good feeling to make use of things that would otherwise go to waste.

Radish Leaf Pesto Rotini, courtesy of Theresa

This looks realy yummy.

I think I might try it!

Pondering the Myriad Things: Radish Leaf Pesto Rotini

The gift of The Four Season Harvest

The ever-inspiring Theresa, of Pondering the Myraid Things, had a Blogiversary book give-away ... and I won a wonderful book on gardening!

It arrived in the mail on Friday, and I've been poring over it since then. The book is The Four Season Harvest, one that's been recommended to me several times, and now that I've perused it, I can see why! The author's approach to gardening makes so much sense ... don't bust your backside doing things the hard way, and implement what you do in such a way that you extend your harvest well beyond what you might expect.

I've been contemplating making a cold frame for awhile now, to get a jump start on spring ... but it hadn't occurred to me that it might be possible to grow cold-hardy things in a cold frame even in the winter! The author of the book is in Maine, where it's awfully cold in winter, but with a bit of a different flavour from what we get here ... still, it's worth a try. There's a bit of a warm microclimate in front of the house, where a straw bale base with a cover might just work.

I'm inspired!

Thanks, Theresa. :)

Learning

Today I made two batches of broth. In my previous life, I didn't eat a lot of meat and what meat we did cook generally came in some kind of bone-free configuration. Now, however, dealing directly with the butchers, we tend to get more bone-in stuff ... and those bones are still a good source of nutrition and shouldn't be allowed to go to waste.

So ... I'm learning to make broth.

The Reluctant Farmer picked up a really big stock pot at Princess Auto (for oh, $14 or something) and we just put two additional filters in the British Berkefeld water filter (meaning it runs water through twice as fast, so it's not such a big deal to use up the water that is there). First two hurdles overcome: pot and water. Check.

Next, bones. I have been putting the bones from our meals (with whatever meat is still attached) in The Bone Bowl in the freezer, and then when it's time to make broth, I grab the bones and dump them in the stock pot with some water. Today I did two batches: one of ham broth (half of which subsequently became the base for a pot of pea soup), and one of lamb (and possibly some beef, I can't remember what all those bones were from). The Green Cookbook provided the list of spices to add to the broth, and somewhere or other I gathered the information that a shot of vinegar helps pull out the calcium from the bones. Since we were all home today (and it was cold), the fireplace was on all day, and the stock pot just sat there on top of the wood stove, burbling away. I peeled potatoes for the dinner stew (cooking in the slow cooker on the counter) and tossed the peels in with the simmering broth to add a bit more nutrition and flavour. I also added a shot of the dehydrated garden greens I put up this summer (mostly beet tops, but some carrot and radish greens are in the mix as well).

When the whole batch was done cooking, the broth was scooped out and poured through a filter, then set to cool. Any fat that congeals on the surface will be scooped off with a spoon and put in a different jar to be rendered into clean lard or tallow later on (or potentially just added to dog food in the winter to help them through the cold days). The clean broth can then go into the freezer for use in stews and soups over the winter. The leftover bits of meat and such are fed to the outside critters (after all the smaller bones are removed, to avoid having anyone choke).

It's really not all that time consuming, and it's certainly more cost effective than buying canned broth or even bullion cubes ... and when you know what all the ingredients are and exactly how it was prepared, somehow, that just seems like a good thing.

I do feel tired sometimes, thinking that I don't really "take a break" anywhere near as often as I would like - there is always something else to do. Sometimes I want to whine about that, it's true. Still, I try to remind myself that a big part of what I am doing is practicing new skills: if I didn't have a well-paying job to go to, I wouldn't mind doing these things ... mostly because I wouldn't be squeezing them in on weekends and days off, they'd just be part of my every day work. However, should these kinds of tasks become my every day work (because I no longer have my well-paying job, for instance) ... well, that wouldn't really be the moment to stop and learn how to do these things. If you need to be sure that if you had to, you could make broth from scratch or put in a successful garden or properly put up the harvest from said garden, well, you'd better have practiced those things earlier, back when you had other options in case your experiments didn't turn out as well as you might have hoped. This year, for instance, I'm really glad we can buy tomatoes at the store - our crop didn't mature before the frost hit. (Next year, I'm going to try some earlier varieties.)

Options. Alternatives. It's nice to have them.

When I bow my head to say grace at dinner after a long day at work, I try to remember to be thankful for the job that has made me weary, because even though I might have rather spent the day doing other things, my tiredness means I have a good paycheque coming and the bills will be paid. On days when I have worked hard on farm jobs or gardening or preserving and my body aches all over and I think I might just be too tired to lift my spoon, I try to remember to be thankful for the opportunity to have worked to exhaustion, because it means I have been making good use of the skills and the land that we have been blessed with.

We really are very fortunate. I could still be living in my little suburban duplex, trudging the long hour and a half commute to a soulless Dilbert job that left me drained and miserable, with bass stero rhythms pounding from teenager's cars outside my window every night. I still have a long commute, but it's a fairly pleasant country drive, and I work with great people doing reasonably interesting things. When I come home, I can look out the window and see the animals munching on hay, and I rest my head against the flank of my lovely cow every morning and hear the sound of milk streaming into the steel bucket between my feet. I look in the potato bin and the pantry and see the results of this year's garden, and I know that next year we can do even more.

Blessed indeed.

The Green Cookbook

One of my most precious posessions is The Green Cookbook.

It's actual title is "Cooking for American Homemakers", and it was published by the Culinary Arts Institute of Chicago in 1965.

My mom received it as a gift from her mother, and she gave it to me. It has instructions for all sorts of basic things that people take for granted - like how to cook eggs in their shells, or how to cut fresh bread easily (use a hot knife). It has recipes for things we wouldn't consider 'regular food', like roasted squirrels and calf's brains (I'm serious). However, it also has information about everything basic to cooking ... like what "heated to the hard-crack stage" means when you're talking about candymaking.

I found an online recipe for mullein cough drops, and, since I grew mullein in the garden this year, I wanted to try it. I was stumped, however, by the directions. "Heat to the hard crack stage" means .. what?

Well, the Green Cookbook had the answer. The hard crack stage means the sugar mixture has been heated to 300 degrees Farenheit, or, when dropped into very cold water it separates into threads which are hard and brittle.

I did manage to make mullein cough candy today - it tastes a lot like molasses, and even if I did make a rather large mess of the kitchen, it was a good practice run.

Eat Wild!

The Eat Wild website is one of the major listings for grass-fed producers.

We are now listed!

Check out the whole site for more details ... there are benefits for animals, for farmers, and for your health!

This is why we prefer to eat the critters we have fed ... we know what went into them, we know they had good, low-stress lives ... and as a result, we know that what ends up on our plates is good for us!